Thursday, August 23, 2018

My last post was part one of an old Daily Peloton story from my archives (it is alas, not in their archive anymore). This week
I give you part two. I left off describing how a bike race announcer has the
difficult job of amping up the crowd and making the complicated sport
accessible to non-fans. Here I pick up that thread again.

Michael Aisner, together with Jeff Roake, did a splendid job announcing the San Francisco
Grand Prix from the finish line along the Embarcadero. It’s not an easy job,
but they managed to keep the crowd engaged during the long spells between laps,
explaining the tactics of the race as they unfolded, and providing interesting
tidbits such as the role of the team car and of the Mavic neutral support. In
what seems to be a tradition, they had longtime cycling fan Robin Williams get
up on the stage for some impromptu comedy: “Look for me, riding with Team
Viagra. You’ll see in the team poster that not many of the bikes have
kickstands. There’s a reason for this.”

But the better race commentary gig was at the top of Taylor
Street, where another announcer, Dave Towle, had his station set up. Here, the
crowd was at least half a dozen deep all the way down the hill, and was curb to
curb farther up Taylor beyond the point where the course turns left. The upward
block of the street is like a natural set of bleachers, except that these
spectators were content to stand for four and a half hours.

Dave and I go way back—we grew up together in Boulder, Colorado,
where he still lives—so it was with particular enjoyment that I watched him
stoking the coals of the throngs of fans. It sure didn’t hurt that his own
enthusiasm was off the charts—I’ve never seen anybody yell into a microphone at
a bike race before—but he also knew the right buttons to push. He sensed that
the crowd’s awareness of its own power was one such button. “If I yell, ‘Okay,
Taylor Street, let’s give it up for these racers, show ‘em what you can do,” he
explained, “I can bring their volume from here” (hand held, palm down, at chest
level) “to here” (hand above head). “Of course, you can only go to that well so
many times.”

Dave doesn’t stop with the spectators: he also works to
motivate the racers themselves. Lap after lap he led the crowd in cheering on
Jason Lokkesmoe, reminding them that this was a young neo-pro from Oakland on
Health Net, a local team. Dave was convinced that for Jason to hear his own name
must have motivated him. “Think about it,” he told me. “When you hear your name
over the loud speaker, time and time again, you start to believe that the
entire crowd, the entire world, is focused on you. And how could you not dig
just a little deeper, knowing that?”

Dave explained the need to gradually build a crescendo as
the race develops. “If you’re telling them on lap three that you’ve never seen
anything so amazing in your life, what are you going to tell them on lap six?
There are only so many times in a day you can be the most amazed you’ve ever
been in your life. These guys are going to think, man, this guy amazes easy.
What, did he just get out of prison?”

The highlight of Dave’s announcing was when he spotted his
fellow Boulderite Trent Klasna, who earlier in the race had done major work for
his Saturn team, then had dropped out, and now had changed into street clothes
and was strolling the course. (To even recognize a cyclist in regular garb is
something of a feat; earlier in the day Lance Armstrong rode right through the start/finish
area in civvies, having dropped out as well, and just about nobody noticed.)
Dave jumped at the opportunity to collar Trent and ask him a few questions, to
give the crowd some insight from a cycling expert who’d sized up this field
from within less than an hour before.

“Trent, right now Saturn has two riders in the group: Chris Horner and Mark McCormack. Mark is the better sprinter. I predict that if it comes
down to a bunch sprint, Chris will lead Mark out. What do you say?” Trent
grinned and assured Dave that it wouldn’t come down to a bunch sprint. And indeed
on the final lap, Chris Horner crested the Taylor Street climb all alone, on
his way to a dramatic victory. Thousands of fans had just witnessed a prophet
in action. Even off the bike, Klasna came off as a most impressive cyclist.

Naturally, any race announcer is subject to the limitations
of his material. If a race isn’t tight enough, no announcer in the world can inject
it with suspense. But when a rider tries something bold, a good announcer can
help the crowd enjoy it. Today was an interesting one in that Horner’s victory
was far from expected, even though he is by many standards the winning-est
rider in the domestic cycling scene. For a time it really looked like Jason
Lokkesmoe was going to sew up the race. He had an amazing ride, starting out in
a group of five that dwindled until it was just Jason and the huge German Rolf
Aldag, both clearly giving it everything they had. But the race was very, very
long. Surely there must have been a point when Lokkesmoe’s s effort seemed quixotic
even to himself. Maybe he stayed out longer, even when he knew he was doomed,
just to put on a good show.

Showmanship is not only a matter of riding fast. I well
remember the Killians team in the Coors Classic who (unlike their sponsor)
hailed from Ireland. I was a young fan, by no means an expert on the rules of
the race, but had been convinced ever since the early 1980s that these guys
were cut some slack on the time cuts because they were so popular with the
crowds. So today I challenged Aisner on this point. “It might have been,” he
said cautiously. “I don’t remember what the circumstances were but it wasn’t
just at face value ‘we let them back in[after missing a time cut].’ But they were crowd pleasers, they did all
sorts of stuff. [Killians rider] Alan [McCormack] had a ... squirt gun, he would
shoot other racers in the pack. There was one year when Paul [McCormack, Alan’s
brother and teammate] was off the back of the criterium in North Boulder Park
and he had an umbrella that had ‘Killian’s’ on it. He had it open, he was
racing with an open umbrella over his head. But these guys weren’t just for
show either. Alan won, he won a ton.”

I asked about Davis Phinney, who had enchanted me as a kid through his pantomime of a clerk punching the
“SALE” button on a cash register every time he won a prime. Aisner replied, “Davis
was flavorful and he was a double whammy because he also delivered and he had
this huge sense of self-confidence, and though many loved it, others liked to
see him lose, but either way [these fans] were out there.... A sport thrives on
the combination of both of those, those who simply excel and those that can
bring more than just cycling to the table.”

Oddly, American cycling may be, from the standpoint of
spectacle, a victim of its own maturity. There was an unpolished, youthful
exuberance to domestic cycling in the 1980s that at its best was Phinney’s cash
register and at its worst was Alexi Grewal tearing his 7-Eleven jersey down the
middle as he crossed the finish line in first. Either way, it was a wild show.
Since that time the phenomenon of the American cycling professional has
steadily developed. Lance is now expected to win the Tour de France, whereas
Phinney’s first Tour stage win was a shock to everybody. As they have adapted
to the European sport, these American riders seem to have adopted its culture
and tradition, which isn’t given to theatrics (beyond the traditional victory salute, of course). This modern professionalism may make it harder for the American spectator to
connect with the cyclists.

For example, this morning I watched the women’s field
assembled a couple of hundred feet behind the start line. I could sense the
tension in that group, especially in the half dozen front-runners waiting about
six feet ahead of the rest of the group. Clearly they understood the importance
of this race. Handled properly, this excitement can be a huge benefit to a
racer, but there’s no benefit to showing your competitors how nervous you are.
I know from my own racing days that when my head was right, the pre-race
feeling was one I think of as “frothy”—my own coinage, based on the image of a
champion racehorse that is literally champing at the bit to start a race, has whipped itself into a lather of sweat, and must be calmed by the
jockey or the trainer. To feel frothy, but not to show it, is admirable—a
result of experience and discipline. The problem is, to the untrained eye it
just looks like somebody who just isn’t taking the race very seriously.

The women I watched today didn’t just have poker-faces; they
were joking around with each other like this was a social event. If you saw
this on TV, you wouldn’t have felt the real tension there. But there was an odd
moment when the announcer had just run down the impressive bio of Mari Holden,
and was about to announce her name to summon her to the line, when his
microphone suddenly cut out. For several awkward seconds, all was silent. Then
I heard Mari whisper to Jessica Phillips, “He forgot his lines.” Jessica
laughed loudly, but it wasn’t the hearty laugh of somebody truly amused; it had
the tense quality of somebody laughing to bleed off nervousness, a venting
laugh, like that of someone watching the tasteless over-the-top comic violence
in “Robocop.” Eventually the crowd got tired of waiting for the announcer and
yelled out, “Mari Holden!” and she pedaled to the line.

There are other ways a non-savvy spectator can misread a
bike race. For example, a strong performance made as a sacrifice to a teammate
can make a good rider look bad. A cycling aficionado knows that when a great
rider crosses the line in fiftieth, it’s probably because he led out his teammate and his job ended 200 meters from the line. But to the casual spectator, it
just looks like a guy who isn’t that strong. I looked for Tim Larkin in the
main bunch at the top of Taylor Street on the last lap today, and while he was
still in contact, he was right on the back and looked pretty fried. Afterward,
I asked what happened and he explained that a group of eight made it off the
front of the main pack before the Taylor Street climb, and because his teammate
was climbing better than he was today, Tim gave everything to drag him up to
the group. As so often happens, this move galvanized the rest of the pack, and
everything came back together, making Tim’s work for naught. But had he not
done it, that group may indeed have stayed off. Tim likely changed the outcome
of the race, but not in any way that made him look good. How many similar
scenarios played themselves out today, unappreciated by the fans? Probably
dozens. And when a rider blows up badly enough to lose contact with the group, there
is nowhere to hide.

Whether this experience is mortifying to the struggling
athlete all depends on the crowd. This sport has the unfortunate characteristic
of looking far easier than it is, so the uninitiated onlooker may not
sympathize with the rider. But if the energy is right, a bicycle race brings
out the best in people: the crowds that turn out cheer on every guy, even the
ones who get dropped, because after all they’re out there pedaling their hearts
out.

It’s a wonderful thing about cycling: even though it’s very
much a team sport, it’s not just two teams, one of which you hope wins. No riot
ever broke out at a bike race because CSC beat Telekom. Ages ago, I watched TV
coverage of unruly Denver Broncos fans who pelted their own team with snowballs because they were losing so
badly. These were not people who stumbled onto a football game in
progress—these are people who paid good money for a seat. They’re supposed to
be the loyal ones! I can’t imagine such an attitude from bike race spectators, who
are watching for the entire spectacle, not out of a tribal instinct to support
their home team. This is true of seasoned fans as well; consider all the French
people who camp out a full week in advance to watch the Alpe d’Huez stage of
the Tour de France, even though a Frenchman hasn’t won there since Bernard
Hinault in 1986.

Granted, such devotion to the sport is far greater in Europe
than in the U.S., but in San Francisco today it was easy to imagine that gap
quickly decreasing. Today the magnanimity of the spectators was on full display.
They didn’t have to be experts on race tactics—not when they were watching on
Taylor Street. They recognized extreme depths of human suffering when they saw it.
Lokkesmoe ended up struggling over the Taylor climb solo, well off the back,
today, but the crowd hadn’t forgotten his earlier glory, and screamed their
lungs out for him.

Of course the fans cheer on the superstars like Lance
Armstrong, but perhaps no more enthusiastically than they cheer for the poor
sods who are way off the back and just trying to keep their bikes going. You
can see how the cheering animates the riders, too: about half way up a climb,
just as one of these guys is about to grind to a halt, you see a little
sheepish grin appear on his face, maybe he shakes his head a little, then gets
out of the saddle and shoves a little harder. The crowd responds to this,
cheers louder, the process repeats, and like a slow-motion hockey puck the guy
is gradually buoyed up the hill, lap after lap. It’s like watching a butterfly
smash against your windshield, and then—like a cartoon of some kind—unfold
itself, try its wings, and fly off again.